A paleoepidemiological approach to the osteological paradox : Investigating stress, frailty and resilience through cribra orbitalia

Open Access via the Jisc Wiley Agreement Funder: British Academy (GrantNumber(s): GP2\190224)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Assessing the Feasibility of Single Trace Power Analysis of Frodo

Lattice-based schemes are among the most promising post-quantum schemes, yet the effect of both parameter and implementation choices on their side-channel resilience is still poorly understood. Aysu et al. (HOST\u2718) recently investigated single-trace attacks against the core lattice operation, namely multiplication between a public matrix and a small secret vector, in the context of a hardware implementation. We complement this work by considering single-trace attacks against software implementations of ring-less LWE-based constructions. Specifically, we target Frodo, one of the submissions to the standardisation process of NIST, when implemented on an (emulated) ARM Cortex M0 processor. We confirm Aysu et al.\u27s observation that a standard divide-and-conquer attack is insufficient and instead we resort to a sequential, extend-and-prune approach. In contrast to Aysu et al. we find that, in our setting where the power model is far from being as clear as theirs, both profiling and less aggressive pruning are needed to obtain reasonable key recovery rates for SNRs of practical relevance. Our work drives home the message that parameter selection for LWE schemes is a double-edged sword: the schemes that are deemed most secure against (black-box) lattice attacks can provide the least security when considering side-channels. Finally, we suggest some easy countermeasures that thwart standard extend-and-prune attacks

White matter changes in microstructure associated with a maladaptive response to stress in rats

In today's society, every individual is subjected to stressful stimuli with different intensities and duration. This exposure can be a key trigger in several mental illnesses greatly affecting one's quality of life. Yet not all subjects respond equally to the same stimulus and some are able to better adapt to them delaying the onset of its negative consequences. The neural specificities of this adaptation can be essential to understand the true dynamics of stress as well as to design new approaches to reduce its consequences. In the current work, we employed ex vivo high field diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to uncover the differences in white matter properties in the entire brain between Fisher 344 (F344) and Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats, known to present different responses to stress, and to examine the effects of a 2-week repeated inescapable stress paradigm. We applied a tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) analysis approach to a total of 25 animals. After exposure to stress, SD rats were found to have lower values of corticosterone when compared with F344 rats. Overall, stress was found to lead to an overall increase in fractional anisotropy (FA), on top of a reduction in mean and radial diffusivity (MD and RD) in several white matter bundles of the brain. No effect of strain on the white matter diffusion properties was observed. The strain-by-stress interaction revealed an effect on SD rats in MD, RD and axial diffusivity (AD), with lower diffusion metric levels on stressed animals. These effects were localized on the left side of the brain on the external capsule, corpus callosum, deep cerebral white matter, anterior commissure, endopiriform nucleus, dorsal hippocampus and amygdala fibers. The results possibly reveal an adaptation of the SD strain to the stressful stimuli through synaptic and structural plasticity processes, possibly reflecting learning processes.We thank Neurospin (high field MRI center CEA Saclay) for providing its support for MRI acquisition. JB was supported by grants from Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM) and Groupe Pasteur Mutualité (GPM). This work was supported by a grant from ANR (SIGMA). This work was performed on a platform of France Life Imaging (FLI) network partly funded by the grant ANR-11-INBS-0006. This work and RM were supported by a fellowship of the project FCT-ANR/NEU-OSD/0258/2012 founded by FCT/MEC (www.fct.pt) and by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER). AC was supported by a grant from the Fondation NRJ.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fast Leakage Assessment

We describe a fast technique for performing the computationally heavy part of leakage assessment, in any statistical moment (or other property) of the leakage samples distributions. The proposed technique outperforms by orders of magnitude the approach presented at CHES 2015 by Schneider and Moradi. We can carry out evaluations that before took 90 CPU-days in 4 CPU-hours (about a 500-fold speed-up). As a bonus, we can work with exact arithmetic, we can apply kernel-based density estimation methods, we can employ arbitrary pre-processing functions such as absolute value to power traces, and we can perform information-theoretic leakage assessment. Our trick is simple and elegant, and lends itself to an easy and compact implementation. We fit a prototype implementation in about 130 lines of C code

Reduction of Mitoferrin Results in Abnormal Development and Extended Lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans

Iron is essential for organisms. It is mainly utilized in mitochondria for biosynthesis of iron-sulfur clusters, hemes and other cofactors. Mitoferrin 1 and mitoferrin 2, two homologues proteins belonging to the mitochondrial solute carrier family, are required for iron delivery into mitochondria. Mitoferrin 1 is highly expressed in developing erythrocytes which consume a large amount of iron during hemoglobinization. Mitoferrin 2 is ubiquitously expressed, whose functions are less known. Zebrafish with mitoferrin 1 mutation show profound hypochromic anaemia and erythroid maturation arrests, and yeast with defects in MRS3/4, the counterparts of mitoferrin 1/2, has low mitochondrial iron levels and grows poorly by iron depletion. Mitoferrin 1 expression is up-regulated in yeast and mouse models of Fiedreich's ataxia disease and in human cell culture models of Parkinson disease, suggesting its involvement in the pathogenesis of diseases with mitochondrial iron accumulation. In this study we found that reduced mitoferrin levels in C. elegans by RNAi treatment causes pleiotropic phenotypes such as small body size, reduced fecundity, slow movement and increased sensitivity to paraquat. Despite these abnormities, lifespan was increased by 50% to 80% in N2 wild type strain, and in further studies using the RNAi sensitive strain eri-1, more than doubled lifespan was observed. The pathways or mechanisms responsible for the lifespan extension and other phenotypes of mitoferrin RNAi worms are worth further study, which may contribute to our understanding of aging mechanisms and the pathogenesis of iron disorder related diseases

Prevention and Mitigation of Acute Radiation Syndrome in Mice by Synthetic Lipopeptide Agonists of Toll-Like Receptor 2 (TLR2)

Bacterial lipoproteins (BLP) induce innate immune responses in mammals by activating heterodimeric receptor complexes containing Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2). TLR2 signaling results in nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB)-dependent upregulation of anti-apoptotic factors, anti-oxidants and cytokines, all of which have been implicated in radiation protection. Here we demonstrate that synthetic lipopeptides (sLP) that mimic the structure of naturally occurring mycoplasmal BLP significantly increase mouse survival following lethal total body irradiation (TBI) when administered between 48 hours before and 24 hours after irradiation. The TBI dose ranges against which sLP are effective indicate that sLP primarily impact the hematopoietic (HP) component of acute radiation syndrome. Indeed, sLP treatment accelerated recovery of bone marrow (BM) and spleen cellularity and ameliorated thrombocytopenia of irradiated mice. sLP did not improve survival of irradiated TLR2-knockout mice, confirming that sLP-mediated radioprotection requires TLR2. However, sLP was radioprotective in chimeric mice containing TLR2-null BM on a wild type background, indicating that radioprotection of the HP system by sLP is, at least in part, indirect and initiated in non-BM cells. sLP injection resulted in strong transient induction of multiple cytokines with known roles in hematopoiesis, including granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF), keratinocyte chemoattractant (KC) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). sLP-induced cytokines, particularly G-CSF, are likely mediators of the radioprotective/mitigative activity of sLP. This study illustrates the strong potential of LP-based TLR2 agonists for anti-radiation prophylaxis and therapy in defense and medical scenarios

From Improved Leakage Detection to the Detection of Points of Interests in Leakage Traces

Leakage detection usually refers to the task of identifying data-dependent information in side-channel measurements, independent of whether this information can be exploited. Detecting Points-Of-Interest (POIs) in leakage traces is a complementary task that is a necessary first step in most side-channel attacks, where the adversary wants to turn this information into (e.g.) a key recovery. In this paper, we discuss the differences between these tasks, by investigating a popular solution to leakage detection based on a t-test, and an alternative method exploiting Pearson\u27s correlation coefficient. We first show that the simpler t-test has better sampling complexity, and that its gain over the correlation-based test can be predicted by looking at the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the leakage partitions used in these tests. This implies that the sampling complexity of both tests relates more to their implicit leakage assumptions than to the actual statistics exploited. We also put forward that this gain comes at the cost of some intuition loss regarding the localization of the exploitable leakage samples in the traces, and their informativeness. Next, and more importantly, we highlight that our reasoning based on the SNR allows defining an improved t-test with significantly faster detection speed (with approximately 5 times less measurements in our experiments), which is therefore highly relevant for evaluation laboratories. We finally conclude that whereas t-tests are the method of choice for leakage detection only, correlation-based tests exploiting larger partitions are preferable for detecting POIs. We confirm this intuition by improving automated tools for the detection of POIs in the leakage measurements of a masked implementation, in a black box manner and without key knowledge, thanks to a correlation-based leakage detection test

The Glasgow Outcome Scale -- 40 years of application and refinement

The Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) was first published in 1975 by Bryan Jennett and Michael Bond. With over 4,000 citations to the original paper, it is the most highly cited outcome measure in studies of brain injury and the second most-cited paper in clinical neurosurgery. The original GOS and the subsequently developed extended GOS (GOSE) are recommended by several national bodies as the outcome measure for major trauma and for head injury. The enduring appeal of the GOS is linked to its simplicity, short administration time, reliability and validity, stability, flexibility of administration (face-to-face, over the telephone and by post), cost-free availability and ease of access. These benefits apply to other derivatives of the scale, including the Glasgow Outcome at Discharge Scale (GODS) and the GOS paediatric revision. The GOS was devised to provide an overview of outcome and to focus on social recovery. Since the initial development of the GOS, there has been an increasing focus on the multidimensional nature of outcome after head injury. This Review charts the development of the GOS, its refinement and usage over the past 40 years, and considers its current and future roles in developing an understanding of brain injury